Is there a hierarchy between packages?

Question

In the code:

\documentclass{article}
\hyphenation{acro-nym}
\usepackage[none]{hyphenat}
\begin{document}
\fbox{\begin{minipage}{3cm}
TUG is an acronym. It means \TeX\ Users Group.
\end{minipage}}
\end{document}

\usepackage[none]{hyphenat} is dominant over \hyphenation{acro-nym} as the outcome is not hyphenized. How can I learn about those hierarchies between commands in the preamble? Did I get it all wrong?

The order here is irrelevant. The package is always dominant over the command. As was said on the other post, maybe you have an older version of the package. — Sigur, Jan 20 '14 at 19:42
To answer the more general question, there are some, but not many package loading order issues. See also Packages that need to be included in a specific order. The most notable is the hyperref package, which generally should be loaded last (with some specific exceptions). See Which packages should be loaded after hyperref instead of before? — Alan Munn, Jan 20 '14 at 19:56

score 6 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 20 '14 at 23:00

It's not a question of hierarchy: you're just saying you want no hyphenation, nada, rien, nicht. Indeed, with \usepackage[none]{hyphenat} you disable all hyphenation, so, no matter what and how many hyphenation exceptions you define, they won't be used.

Why would anybody want no hyphenation throughout a document is beyond my understanding. Hyphenation is good, provided it's not too frequent; it is used in books of the finest quality and there can be no serious objection to it. If the text width is set carefully, a language like English needs very few hyphens; of course, in narrow columns it will become more frequent.

The only way to avoid hyphenation in a consistent way is to set the text raggedright: justification would be out of the question. There are too many word processed document around that show the ugliness of justified text without hyphenation: please don't contribute to pollution. ;-)

Occasionally I have been asked not for Word but simply for something which looks like Word. In that case, it is easier to fake Word output with pdfLaTeX than it is to convert the code to ODT/Word. I forget the details but I imagine I probably disabled hyphenation. (But I can't find the document I applied this to - not sure what I've done with it.) — cfr, Jan 20 '14 at 23:19

Is there a hierarchy between packages?

1 Answers1